Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Previously, I had been maintaining several binpatch build environments to support multiple kernels (GENERIC, GENERIC.MP, GENERIC with RAIDFrame support, GENERIC.MP with RAIDFrame support, GENERIC.MP with pcibios disabled and GENERIC.MP with RAIDFrame support with pcibios disabled) and sendmail with SASL support.

This was becoming too much to handle. Plus, I wanted to add some features. Here's a (probably incomplete) list of enhancements coming soon (some changes were already in my binpatch files):

As I've stated in previous posts, I use YAIFO (Yet Another Installer for OpenBSD) to do remote upgrades of my OpenBSD boxes. By remote, sometimes I mean the server sitting in the other room. :)

It seems that development of YAIFO has stopped (and the site is inaccessible). I had previously made a few patches to improve usability (for me) and to make it work with 3.9 and 4.0. But, it started getting complicated with too many patches. So I combined all of the patches into single OpenBSD-version specific files (meaning one for 3.9 and one for 4.0).

If you've found this page via Google and are just looking for the unmodified YAIFO code, you're welcome to download it from my server.

However, I've made several useful modifications and some necessary fixes to make YAIFO work with versions of OpenBSD after 3.8 (that are available as patch files):

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

With the recent release of OpenBSD 4.0, it's that time to upgrade your machines again! I used to just do clean installs, re-install all packages and manually upgrade /etc and /var. Since the pkg_* tools have improved so much in recent versions and I learned of mergemaster, I now do upgrades (more often).

I've posted in the past about how I used mergemaster ([1], [2], [3]), but only briefly. I decided it was time for a post specifically about mergemaster and how to use it.

Friday, November 3, 2006

It seems that the old YaifO site is down. You can download the latest (as of the last time I checked) from from my site.

Additionally, I've applied some patches to it that fix some of the problems I had with it (including not working under 3.8 and 4.0). Other fixes include the ability to compile the yaifo kernel ramdisk with your ssh_host_keys so you don't have to muck with your ~/.ssh/known_hosts when upgrading. And my favorite patch: use ${SUDO} where ever needed (if defined) so you don't have to run "make" as root.